You Can't Make This Stuff Up

This morning started out as a frustrating carp morning. I'm sincerely getting sick of these fish. I'll be annoyed about them right up until I hook a big one, but who knows how long it will be until that happened. As a backup plan I decided to tie up a two fly rig and catch a whole crap load of white perch, and that's just what I did. It's fun to have a nice perch take the lead fly and just let him tow the dropper around until that gets hit. It's really stupidly easy. It doesn't really even matter what the fly is that you use, anything with a slim profile in size 6-10, preferably with a bead head. My flies were WRECKED by the time I left but I was still getting at least a fish a cast. Out of about 300 casts there were only a handful, maybe ten at most, that didn't result in a fish coming to hand.

I was having a lot of fun with those perch, but frankly I have grown up from the days when I thought this was a really good day on this body of water. I wouldn't be posting this if something special and really crazy hadn't happened on this morning. Now, by farm my favorite flies for summer smallmouth here are much smaller than usually used for bass. Much the same size as those I use for the white perch. So when I'm using size 6 Hare's Ears like I was today and catching tons of perch I am always prepared for a bigger fish. Somewhere in the middle of my outing today I hooked into an average sized perch on the top fly. I really didn't even get a chance to do anything before the point fly got slammed by a nice smallmouth. I didn't realize that was what it was at first, but then it did what a smallmouth does and jumped about two feet in the air... with the perch in tow! It was crazy. I've never seen anything like it. Out comes the smallmouth, and behind it is the little perch probably scared half to death, then the smallmouth makes a hard dig as soon as its back in the water and it slams that perch back down! Crazy. I've never seen anything like it. I was laughing my butt off after I released them both. You can't make this stuff up!